Hey guys,

We have just started working on a new short film, and shot the first scene last night. The basic basic problem is that the lighting from when we started shooting at 7:30 PM (central) is different than the footage from when we finished at 8:30 PM (central). I knew this would be a problem going into the shoot, but we really need our scene to take place toward the end of the day during sun down. And its honestly not THAT bad, but for the scene only being 2 minutes out of the film, I think there are notable differences.

I would like to darken the stuff from earlier in the shoot to make it match the footage from the end (making 7:30 look more like 8:15 or so). I found the "Gamma Correction" filter under "Image Control" and played around with that some. It basically just lightened and darkened the picture, which will help. Are there any other good techniques for fixing this difference? I thought about also adding some more blues with color correction to the earlier stuff to make it seem like there is less sun...

Let me know if anyone has any good ideas/techniques for this!

Scott

Your best friend in this situation would be the 3-Way Color Corrector; within it's advanced tools are all the settings you'll need to do what you're after.

I know that earlier versions of FCE (Final Cut Express) did not include the 3 way color corrector. Has this changed? If you do have it, I'd agree it's the way to go. And the FCP manual has a good tutorial (view the PDF version using the Help Menu, which has examples in color).

But again, I'm thinking of FCP and haven't ever used FCE.

Boyd is right - I missed the "FCE" part in your post, Scott. My bad.

FCE does not have the 3-way color corrector but, you do have similar functionality by using filter combinations. Here's a great and simple tutorial on how to do what you need in FCE:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/cheating_fce_color_seth.html

In FCE, you can emulate the 3-way CC in a couple of ways. You can either:

1) use 3 regular color correctors, but use the limit effects stuff at the bottom to have one cover darks, one mids and one lights on the brightness limiter.

2) use luma masks to choose what parts of the image to affect in stead of the limit effect sliders.